Ward v. State

313 Ga. 265

869 S.E.2d 470

WARD

v.The STATE.

S21A1309

Supreme Court of Georgia.

Decided: February 15, 2022

Katie Alice Hingerty Borodin, General Counsel, The Hingerty Law Firm, LLC, 2300 Henderson Mill Road NE, Suite 300, Eliot Jay Abt, Abt Law Firm, P.C., Suite 525, 2295 Parklake Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30345, for Appellant.

Patricia B. Attaway Burton, Deputy Attorney General, Paula Khristian Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Christopher M. Carr, Attorney General, Mark Samuel Lindemann, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Law, 40 Capitol Square, S.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30334, Allison Thatcher Mauldin, A.D.A., Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office, 113 North Main Street, Suite 216, Greensboro, Georgia 30642, Tuttle Wright Barksdale, III, District Attorney, Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office, P.O. Box 1209, Gray, Georgia 31032, for Appellee.

Nahmias, Chief Justice.

Appellant Rodricus Ward was convicted of malice murder and firearm offenses in connection with the shooting death of his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Darla Gibbons. He appeals, contending that the evidence presented at his trial was insufficient to support his convictions and that the trial court erred in allowing six witnesses to testify about hearsay statements that Gibbons made to them. Appellant also argues that his trial counsel provided ineffective assistance in three ways: by failing to adequately argue against the State's motion to introduce the hearsay testimony; by failing to try to suppress all of Appellant's interview with two police detectives; and by failing to sufficiently prepare for trial. We see no reversible error, so we affirm.¹

1. The evidence presented at trial showed the following. On Wednesday, October 22, 2014, a worker discovered a burned-out car with a charred human body in its trunk at a rock quarry adjacent to a local airport in Athens. The body was identified as Gibbons by dental analysis; the car was a white Buick Sentry that her mother had bought for her nine days earlier. Gibbons was killed by two gunshots to her head; two .25-caliber bullets were found in her skull. Her autopsy and a fire investigator's examination of the car indicated that the car's trunk was intentionally set on fire after Gibbons was killed.

Appellant and Gibbons had been dating on and off for about nine years. According to Gibbons's friends and family, the pair had a "rocky" relationship and argued constantly, with Appellant sometimes becoming violent. Appellant once punched Gibbons and threw her over a couch. On another occasion, while driving Appellant home, Gibbons had to pull over to the side of the road, and they got into a physical fight. In the months before her death, Gibbons told friends and family that she had been trying to collect money that she lent to Appellant, but he was evading payment. Gibbons and Appellant also fought about her recent pregnancy with their child and her subsequent miscarriage.²

Text messages between Gibbons and Appellant indicate that they were together for part of the weekend before her body was found (October 18 and 19). On Monday, October 20, Gibbons told her co-worker and friend, Rodney Rivers, that she was "going to call it off" with Appellant. Cell phone records and surveillance video recordings from Gibbons's apartment complex in Atlanta showed that she returned home from work at 6:36 p.m. and left again at 7:49 p.m. A later search of her apartment showed that her toothbrush, shampoo, and soap were missing. Gibbons was scheduled to be off work on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Right after Gibbons left her apartment on Monday night, she called Appellant and spoke with him for 47 minutes, while her phone traveled east toward his residence in the Union Point area near Greensboro in Greene County. Around 9:00 p.m., Gibbons called Appellant again; her phone pinged a cell tower in the Union Point area. Gibbons's phone signal then remained stationary for about three-and-a-half hours, pinging close to Appellant's residence. At 12:45 a.m. on Tuesday, October 21, her phone began moving toward Athens. At 1:50 a.m., her phone pinged the tower serving the rock quarry area where her body was found. The phone signal disappeared at 2:17 a.m., indicating that the phone had a dead battery, was turned off, or was destroyed.

Between midnight and 1:00 a.m. on Tuesday, Appellant contacted his nephew, Marquavious Peek, and asked Peek to ride with him from Greensboro to Athens. Peek testified as follows. When he arrived at Appellant's residence around 1:00 a.m., Appellant was waiting for him outside. They got into a white Buick, and Appellant drove them toward Athens. Peek did not see anyone else inside the car, but he may have seen a purse. After driving for less than an hour, Appellant stopped the car near an airport sign and told Peek to get out. Appellant drove away, and then returned on foot about 40 minutes later. When Peek asked Appellant what happened to the car, Appellant said: "I had to get rid of it."³ Peek and Appellant then walked to a mobile home park and knocked on someone's door. One of the occupants let Appellant use his phone to call Appellant's sister, Crystal Haley. Haley received this call at 1:34 a.m. and said that she would pick them up on the way to her paper route.⁴ Peek and Appellant walked to a gas station. At 4:03 a.m., Haley picked up Peek and Appellant. Around 5:00 a.m., after completing her paper route, Haley dropped off Appellant and Peek at Appellant's residence.

When investigators searched Appellant's bedroom on October 23, the day after Gibbons's body was discovered, they found that a section of carpet in the middle of the room was missing, and the bedding and mattress appeared to be brand new, with some tags still attached. A blood reagent indicated the presence of wiped-up blood on the floor and on a wall, with droplets going toward the door, and a blood stain, which DNA testing later confirmed to be from Gibbons, was found on an electrical cord. Investigators also found a spent .25-caliber cartridge case and an unfired .25-caliber cartridge.

During a lengthy interview with two police detectives on the day of the search, Appellant said that he and Gibbons had been dating on and off for nine years, that he "wasn't doing right" by her, that they argued a lot but he never laid hands on her, that she had been pregnant but miscarried because he had given her a sexually transmitted disease ("STD"), and that she gave him $600 for his birthday and then could not pay her own rent. Appellant claimed that he had not seen Gibbons since August, but he also said that his fingerprints would be in her Buick (which she got on October 13). He provided several vague and contradictory accounts of his activities on October 20. Appellant, who was convicted of robbery in 2008, also claimed that he had not held a gun since 2010. He later allowed the detectives to take his phone and download its contents. In his phone's recently deleted photo album, the detectives found a video recorded around 8:30 p.m. on Monday, October 20, showing Appellant pointing a small-caliber pistol at the camera. The firearms examiner testified that the gun appeared to be a .22-, .25-, or .32-caliber. Appellant did not testify at trial.

2. Appellant contends that the evidence presented at his trial was constitutionally insufficient to support his convictions. We disagree. In evaluating the sufficiency of the evidence under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, we consider whether any rational jury could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. See Jackson v. Virginia , 443 U.S. 307, 319, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979) ; Johnson v. State , 312 Ga. 481, 487, 863 S.E.2d 137 (2021). "We leave to the jury the resolution of conflicts or inconsistencies in the evidence, credibility of witnesses, and reasonable inferences to be derived from the facts." Smith v. State , 308 Ga. 81, 84, 839 S.E.2d 630 (2020). When properly viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, the evidence presented at Appellant's trial, as summarized above, was easily sufficient to find him guilty of the crimes of which he was convicted. See Jackson , 443 U.S. at 319, 99 S.Ct. 2781.⁵

3. Appellant contends that the trial court erred in allowing six witnesses, who were Gibbons's close friends and family, to testify about his relationship problems with Gibbons. Appellant argues that the testimony was inappropriately admitted under OCGA § 24-8-807 ("Rule 807"), the residual exception to the hearsay rule.⁶ Appellant also contends that the testimony of one of these witnesses, Brittany Griffeth, was inadmissible because the State did not give timely notice of her testimony as required by Rule 807.

At trial, Appellant's counsel objected before the first of these witnesses testified, making an argument that was somewhat confused but appeared to include the grounds that Appellant raises here.⁷

The trial court overruled the objection. We will assume that Appellant's Rule 807 claims were properly preserved and review the trial court's decision to admit the testimony for an abuse of discretion. See State v. Holmes , 304 Ga. 524, 529, 820 S.E.2d 26 (2018). But we note that "[t]his Court is particularly hesitant to overturn a trial court's admissibility ruling under the residual hearsay exception absent a definite and firm conviction that the court made a clear error of judgment in the conclusion it reached based upon a weighing of the relevant factors." Id. (citation and punctuation omitted).

(a) The six witnesses about whom Appellant complains gave the following testimony at trial.

First, Rodney Rivers testified that he and Gibbons were co-workers and good friends; he was "like a big brother to her." Gibbons told him that she and Appellant dated on and off through college and that "[s]he really loved [Appellant] a lot." At work, Rivers overheard Gibbons and Appellant...